BIRTHFIT | Leah Barto

Today, we talk with Leah Barto, a gym owner, strength and conditioning coach, and birth doula, as well as online program director and coach staff at BIRTHFIT, an empowering birth education program and community (https://birthfit.com/about/birthfit-team/). We start our discussion with Leah telling us how she got her start in BIRTHFIT and as a birth doula. She tells us more about BIRTHFIT, explaining that it is an educational platform that specializes in fitness for pregnant and postpartum women, and focuses on mindset, nutrition, and connection within the birth team. She shares that she is passionate about making the necessary but often hard-to-find information about birth to mothers everywhere. She also shares that the fitness training approach in BIRTHFIT focuses on training pregnant women towards the end goal of birth, shifting their mindset to being “in season” for birth. She then breaks down their approach to fitness even more, explaining how it prepares women for birth and postpartum. We then discuss diet and nutrition, and BIRTHFIT’s unique “mind-body nourishment” approach. We talk more about connection and building your birth team, discussing how BIRTHFIT focuses on the benefits of chiropractic care, and how they provide a directory of specialized and like-minded local chiropractors, doulas, and coaches. Leah then explains how BIRTHFIT involves the partner in coming up with birth preferences. She then emphasizes how you are always going to be postpartum once you’ve given birth, and how the mentality of moving forward instead of returning to pre-birth body is an important part of their postpartum healing program. She breaks that program down into its separate phases, including 30 day healing, 30 day basics, and 12 week focused training, and then a return to regular fitness. Leah shares how the core principles of BIRTHFIT are for everyone, and how they are developing an everyday program for those who embrace that mindful, connected way of life. We finish by discussing breath, sound, movement, and the autonomic nervous system, and how learning to control these can really help the birthing process. We invite you to visit https://birthfit.com to access a rich variety of information through their blogs and podcast. 

• 1:05 How Leah Entered the Birth World
• 4:07 What is BIRTHFIT?
• 18:10 Nutrition and Building Your Birth Team
• 38:59 Resources for Partner 
• 42:00 Postpartum Healing; Breath, Sound, and Movement 

“I’m a coach, I’m a doula, I can help you, but if you come to me and potentially have a prolapse, I don’t know internally what’s going on, I’m gonna refer to a pelvic floor pt and work with her on the same team, versus saying, ‘Oh, well let’s just assume it’s a grade one, so we’ll do this,’ and make it worse.”  38:14

 

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